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AMD Catalyst 8.5 For Linux

05-21-2008, 01:40 PM

Phoronix: AMD Catalyst 8.5 For Linux

All of the Catalyst Linux driver releases this year have been... well, boring. There have been a few bug fixes in each release and new product support for the latest ATI/AMD GPUs, but no major features have been introduced in several months. However, during this time we've been telling you to get ready for an interesting summer and that "we have reason to believe AMD does have some Linux work under development that could make 2007 look boring compared to this year." It was in 2007 that AMD had introduced their brand-new driver with AIGLX support. Well, with the release today of Catalyst 8.5 the monthly Linux driver releases are becoming more interesting and we should have several exciting months ahead. What does today's Linux driver bring to the table? We'll give you the run-down in this article, but to get you started there is now Catalyst AI, Linux 2.6.25 support, and much improved 2D performance!

2D is still slow in certain situations, like in FF with Compiz on, but I think that's more of a FF problem. The extra 3D options are good, like the custom AA filters (not as many as in the Windows driver though) and Catalyst AI; Vsync options seems to be broken since all options either force it on or off globally, independent of individual application settings, although the Windows driver suffers from the same problem. Video tearing with Xv and OpenGL is still there, which not only affects videos but games and other type of renderings like screensavers. Haven't tested video out yet, but I have never had any serious problems with it aside from AMDCCCLE messing up. As far as raw 3D performance, nothing changed much for my cards, but that's not entirely a bad thing (all my cross-platform games show 5-15% difference in favor of the Windows driver). Overall a good solid release.

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I'm downloading it at the moment, sounds interesting so far...
You know, I'm preparing a presentation for school which I must show in a week. Well, there is one page on which there are many pictures fading in and out with alpha blending, but I have no idea how this will look like on the presentation computer as Catalyst 8.4 lags like hell in open office
hm... 12% *sigh*, They still haven't fixed the big file size ;-)

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I tested it, for 5 minutes.
Overall performance seems to drop, totally. Instead of faster 2D, it feels like a lot slower 2D. 3D mseems to be slower as well.
Besides that, I am getting a VERY annoying overscan AND an ugly icon in the down right corner saying "AMD tesing use only". This really isn't funny.

All old bugs I've ever had are still present.

Nothing improved. BAD release .. as usual

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ew.. what I know so far is that the refresh rate detection got non-functional for me... could also be that I was using livna repos before....
My only problem is that I broke my kde 4 when trying to install amarok 2 alpha for f9 on a f8 machine

And BTW... Can anyone point out to me how I can find out the vertical and horizontal refresh rate of my monitor??

EDIT: Yeah, I'm getting this ugly AMD Testing thing, too...
Maybe I can tell my friends that I'm using beta software only on my system and show how 1337 I am then, but this icon could REALLY be prettier ;-)

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ok the "AMD testing use only" stamp is really funny and that not much annoying...

what i find very annoying is that the catalyst control center always shows "version 1.0" and "memory 128MB" while i've got 512MB!! and it feels like it just detects them... or at least the half of 512....